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Sunday, May 28, 2017

The release date for Bill Hope: His Story was May 17, so those who have already ordered it from Amazon should be receiving it shortly, and anyone who wishes to order it can do so and have it promptly shipped.

For six LibraryThing prepublication reviews of Bill Hope: His Story by viennamax, stephvin, Cricket2014, Shoosty, terry19802, and graham072442, go here and scroll down.

New York City, with its great diversity, has every kind of
occupation, some unusual, some unique, and a few just flat-out weird.This post and the next will have a look at
some of them.

Structural
engineer.Suppose you’re buying an
old house or a brownstone.How do you
know if it’s architecturally sound?Before closing the deal you hire a structural engineer to look it
over.A walk-through inspection costs
$400 to $800, but if it saves you from acquiring a nightmare, it’s worth it.

Maybe they needed a structural engineer.서울특별시 소방재난본부

Environmental
consultant.Environmental
regulations can be a baffling maze of requirements, and New York is fiercely
regulated.In old buildings, asbestos
may have been used in construction, and lead in paint; both are toxic.Waste must be disposed of properly; your
building may be in a flood zone; your planned renovation may have undesirable
consequences; and so on.If, as a
property owner or business, you aren’t sure if you’re complying and you fear a
fine, you hire an environmental consultant to make sure you’re in
compliance.

Sidewalk vendor.They’re all over the place, selling food,
accessories, souvenirs, art, and books.But Kirk Davidson, who sells books on the west side of Broadway near 73rd
Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is a special kind of vendor, for he
has been there for years, a neighborhood fixture, and leaves his stock out overnight
under plastic.He began with a flimsy
folding table and a few items in 1986, but now offers a host of books stacked
high on ten or more tables.Some
neighbors approve, others say his tables are an eyesore and block a congested
sidewalk.Over the years he has been
served with summonses and suffered seizures of his stock, but has usually won
dismissals by pointing out errors in the summonses and citing laws on free
speech.But that’s not the end of it,
for he then sues the city for unlawful enforcement and seizure, and claims to
have netted settlements totaling $80,000.Recently the city assigned two police officers on rotating shifts to make
sure his tables were not left unattended, which violates the law – an
assignment, Mr. Davidson emphasizes, that costs taxpayers unconscionable
sums.No question, he’s a real New
Yorker, full of chutzpah and hustle, but now he’s decided to limit himself to
four tables, “just enough to pay my bills and live on.”

Hennem08

Hotel archivist.A hotel with its very own archivist?Weird.But not if the hotel in question is the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue
between East 49th and 50th Streets in Manhattan, a luxury
hotel famous for its two-tiered ballroom, its celebrity residents, and a vast
lobby that I used to visit briefly, to hear harp music drifting gently down
from a harpist on a balcony above.The
archivist, Granada-born Deirdre Dinnigan, sits in a cramped room in a
windowless corner of the hotel’s second-floor administrative offices,
cataloguing and researching more than 4,000 objects that include filigreed
brass room numbers, menus, letters, staff uniforms and linens, fine china,
ashtrays, silverware, and yellowing ads from the 1950s – a job she loves.But a Chinese insurance company bought the
hotel in 2014 and plans to convert it into luxury condominiums with a much
smaller hotel component.While the hotel
will include the archive, Ms. Dinnigan is worried about keeping her job.Meanwhile she’s working diligently to
catalogue materials and also to record the oral histories of longtime
employees.But in March the hotel shut
down for its two-year renovation, forcing guests to leave, some of them in
tears.

Wigmaker.He has 600 pounds of hair – gray, brown, and
blond – in his Staten Island garage, where the hairs sit in bundles and,
uncoiled, are three feet long and almost reach the ground.He is Nicholas Piazza, the grandson of
Sicilian immigrants, who for decades made custom wigs and hairpieces for such luminaries
as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, socialite and philanthropist Brooke Astor, and singer
Lena Horne.He is one of the few
remaining Old World wigmakers, trained mostly by Jewish and Italian immigrants
in the centuries-old trade of making wigs by hand, an intricate process
producing hairlines that blend into the skin.But wig-making today is not a dying industry, since celebrities have
made it an “in” thing, very cool, and wigs are also in demand for Metropolitan
operas and Broadway musicals.Yet the
master wigmakers of old are fading away, replaced by imports from China, where the
painstaking work is done by thousands of factory workers.And since hairlines are really a challenge,
lots of today’s wigs feature bangs.Genuine human hair has become hard to obtain, but at age 68, working
part-time in a Midtown salon, Mr. Piazza has enough to last him out.And the cost of his wigs?$3,850 and up.

U.S. Coast Survey, Coast Chart No. 21, New York Bay and Harbor, 1861. Staten Island and Brooklyn almost kiss at the Narrows. To continue in an erotic mode, the erection at the bottom of the map is Sandy Hook.

Channel master.In this age of air travel it’s easy to
forget that ocean liners and cargo ships come and go in the port of New
York.But the Outer Harbor – the waters
beyond the Narrows but this side of Sandy Hook – is a maze of shallow channels
between shifting sandbars, and to negotiate those channels requires the
knowledge and skill of members of the Sandy Hook Pilots Association.(A brief geographical note: The Narrows is
where the entrance to the harbor is the narrowest, between Brooklyn and Staten
Island.Sandy Hook is a long, thin
finger of land that sticks out from New Jersey to enclose the Outer Harbor,
beyond which lies the open sea.)It is
the job of these 75 pilots (4 of them women) to go out in small boats to board
incoming and outgoing vessels and guide them through these channels.Their job is more essential than ever today,
since the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran
aground in Alaska in 1989 and spilled millions of gallons of heavy black crude;
such an accident in the waters around New York would be disastrous for the U.S.
economy.But today the pilots are
maritime college graduates, and after a five-year apprenticeship they take a
four-day state exam thatrequires them
to know every rock, reef, shoal, pipeline, and cable in the harbor.Calm waters make their job easier; bad weather
with high winds is another matter.

A pilot boat in the Inner Harbor, 2007.

Crematory
manager.The walls are lined with
niches containing the ashes of deceased New Yorkers, some of the remains in old
cinerary urns displayed in glass-encased time capsules with displays of
photographs and keepsakes.The interior of
the building has marble floors and walls, stained-glass windows, Oriental rugs,
and antique furniture.But towering
above the neo-Classical building is a smokestack to convey heavenward – or at
least skyward – the fumes from incineration, for this is the Fresh Pond
Crematory in Middle Village, Queens, presided over by J.P. Di Troia, president,
and his wife, the vice president.Mr. Di
Troia insists that cremation is an efficient and graceful alternative to
burial, and his four high-temperature retorts have performed 270,000 cremations
since Fresh Pond opened in the mid-1880s.His uncle ran the place when Mr. Di Troia was a child, and he began
working there at age 17 and subsequently worked his way up to vice president,
and then to president when his uncle died.He considers himself the keeper of 40,000 souls (Ring Lardner among
them), and when he leaves each night, he says good-bye to them.Adorned with mementos of the departed, the
niches, he insists, are a celebration of lives.

A modern crematory oven.

You think crematory manager is a rather strange occupation,
even weird?Wait till you see what’s in
next week’s post.

Source note:For much of the information in this post, I am indebted to articles in
various editions of the New York Times:

BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Coming soon:The Sultan of
Smut, an $800 million collection (and it isn’t smut), Bang Bang and Megan
Massacre, deaths from mania in the 1840s, and cracking open a chest (the human
kind) with clippers: more where-but-in-New-York occupations.

Sunday, May 21, 2017

The release date for Bill Hope: His Story was last Wednesday, May 17, so those who have already ordered it from Amazon should be receiving it shortly, and anyone who wishes to order it can do so and have it promptly shipped.

Imagine a landmarked hotel with a handsome wrought-iron
interior stairwell and walls adorned with art, but now described as a
junky-infested flophouse pulsing with creative energy.A hotel where young singers check in, write a
few songs, and check out, then use the illustrious name of the hotel to help
sell their records.A hotel where young
would-be starlets stay for a few weeks
to suck up the bohemian atmosphere, then check out and hopefully go on to
greater things, or maybe never check out and grow old and weird, becoming fixtures in the weirdest
of scenes.A hotel where young punk
rockers in black leather jackets, tattered clothing, and mohawks lounge about
in the lobby, adorned with black eye makeup and tattoos, and at intervals beg
to stay in room 100, only to be told, “There is no room 100!”

Imagine a hotel where film crews suddenly arrive with
trailers blocking the street, set up tables on the sidewalk, and pile junk in
front of the door, then crowd the lobby and stairwells and elevators, shooting
TV episodes and even big-budget Hollywood films, yelling all the time and
running noisy machines that blow the hotel’s fuses.A hotel where residents might come home to
see a naked model posing for a film crew right in front of the door to their
room.Where the tenants wear black
leather or the latest high fashion, or blue hair, or a rumpled suit that makes
them look like Dylan Thomas, or T-shirts and khakis like they wore in college.Where the bathroom may have a floor, sink,
shower curtain, and tub caked with black, greasy grime, or blood on the toilet
and floor, and old needles and baggies strewn about, deposited by trespassing
junkies. A hotel where, whenevertenants complain to the manager, he denies flat-out
that anything going on is illegal or out of order or wrong.

Welcome to the legendary Chelsea Hotel, a venerable 12-story
Victorian Gothic structure at 222 West 23rd Street in Chelsea, long
a haven for struggling writers, artists, musicians, outlaws, freaks, and
crazies.Built in 1883 as a lavishly
decorated co-op apartment residence, in 1905 it became a residential hotel
catering to theater luminaries like Sarah Bernhardt, who reputedly slept in a
coffin, as well as LillianRussell, Mark
Twain, and (under various names, in hiding from the law) O. Henry. In the 1930s the brooding novelist Thomas
Wolfe lived in room 831, where he wrote You
Can’t Go Home Again.

Beyond My Ken

The
1940s and 1950s were hard times for the Chelsea: stained-glass windows,
mirrors, and ornate woodwork were torn out, as spacious suites were divided up
into tiny rooms, and the hotel became little more than a flophouse.Many of the old residents refused to vacate, thus
preserving some of the original architectural detail, and impecunious writers
continued to flock there.It was at the
Chelsea – where else? – that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, having imbibed
heavily at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, collapsed, and was
rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died a few days later. In the 1960s various Andy Warhol superstars
checked in, and Warhol’s film Chelsea
Girls was shot there in 1966. Bob
Dylan resided there from 1961 to 1964, as did other cultural luminosities and
oddities, including Valerie Solanas, famous for shooting Andy Warhol.Punk rockers and gay photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe frequented the hotel in the 1970s, followed by Madonna and various
artists in the 1980s and beyond.Indeed,
one might ask who of the cultural elite didn’t show up there at one time or
another.Or at least, who of the avant-garde
crowd of the time, usually in the early and less recognized phase of their
career.

The Chelsea's wrought-iron stairwell.
Calton

Presiding over this weirdest and most creative of hotels was
its proprietor, Stanley Bard, who was born in the Bronx in 1934 to Jewish
immigrants from Hungary.His father had
bought an ownership stake in the place in 1947, and the son began working there
as a plumber’s assistant just ten years later.After that he got a B.A. in accounting from New York University and
served in the Army following the Korean War.When his father died in 1964, Stanley took over, thus inaugurating the
Chelsea’s era of greatness … and weirdness.Round-faced with blue eyes and a hearty grin, he was partial to creative
types of every stripe and hue, welcomed them with open arms, and was amazingly
indulgent when it came to lapses in behavior and the payment of rent.Word of his benign management soon spread,
which explains the influx of creative personalities mixed in with assorted
deadbeats and weirdos.

Not that the Chelsea of recent times was the elegant
hostelry of yore.The halls were dimly
lit with long fluorescent tubes; the walls had cracked plaster, peeling paint,
and exposed wires; the furniture was old and crumbling, the carpets stained and
dirty; and pests roamed freely in the utter absence of exterminators.But if anyone complained of roaches or mice,
or a lack of heat or running water, or violence in the halls, or a filthy
bathroom littered with the paraphernalia of junkies, Stanley Bard simply denied
the facts put forth to him.According to
him, the writers and artists on the premises were happy, brilliant, and
prosperous, glad to be living in the Chelsea’s luxurious accommodations.Con man or perennial optimist gazing through
rose-tinted spectacles, he maintained this illusion for over 40 years, while tolerating
or even encouraging the eccentricities of tenants.If an artist who owed him two months’ rent
came to him in tears, fearing eviction, he would say, “Don’t worry, keep
painting, keep painting.”In spite of the
hotel’s deteriorating conditions, creativity flourished and evictions were
rare.

The lobby of the Chelsea Hotel in 2010.
Historystuff2

In Legends of the
Chelsea Hotel Ed Hamilton, himself a resident, chronicles the strange
people and stranger doings typical of the hotel.For instance:

·An underground filmmaker who claimed he had become a
voodoo priest in Haiti and had a Zombie slave in his apartment.

·A drunk resident who scared his neighbors by
practicing swordsmanship in the hall, having got a role in a Shakespeare play.

·A white-haired lady who threatened junkies with a gun whenever
they tried to shoot up in her bathroom.

·An aging actress living on food stamps who hadn’t paid
rent in seven years.

·A delusional photographer who claimed mysterious
intruders were trying to steal his photographs.

·A young woman who worked off and on as a model and put
off paying rent, promising to pay it when she sold a Larry Rivers painting
worth fifty thousand dollars, but who finally had to move out.

But there were famous residents as well.After his breakup with Marilyn Monroe in
1960, playwright Arthur Miller moved in, wanting a quiet place where he could
work in peace, but was soon badgering Stanley to send someone up to his room to
vacuum a carpet caked with grit.Jack
Kerouac may or may not have written On
the Road on the premises (accounts differ), but evidently had sex there
with Gore Vidal.Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs were there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it was
there that Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch.

And there were grim doings as well.When a junky died in one of the rooms, the
police took over the ninth floor, and tenants were barred from going up, until a body bag was removed on a stretcher.

“What’s going on on the ninth floor?” someone asked Stanley
Bard.

“Nothing,” said Bard.“Why would you ask that?”

“There were cops all over the place!”

“No there weren’t.”

“Yes there were!”

“You may have seen one or two policemen.They probably have a room here.”

“Joe’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Joe?Oh no, Joe’s
fine.He just went on a little
vacation.Europe, I think.He’ll be back in a couple of years, I’m
sure.”

Stanley Bard’s denial of unpleasant reality was absolute and
unflinching.Nothing of the incident
appeared in the papers, and tenants almost wondered if they had seen a body bag
or not.

Sid Vicious, January 1978.
Chicago Art Department

Room 100 – the one the young punk rockers kept clamoring to
stay in – had witnessed another
horrendous event not easily denied.On
the morning of October 12, 1978, Sid Vicious, formerly with the punk rock band
the Sex Pistols, woke up in a drug-induced stupor, found his girlfriend Nancy
Spungen stabbed to death in the bathroom, and called the police.In his confused state of mind Vicious
confessed to the crime and then denied it, and was promptly arrested and
charged with murder.Four months later
he died of an overdose while out on bail awaiting trial.His guilt seemed obvious to many, but some
have argued that a drug dealer killed her while Vicious was unconscious, and
others have asserted that Nancy killed herself. So began the legend that
brought young punk rockers flocking to the Chelsea in hopes of gaining access
to the room; when management denied its existence, they carved their initials
into the door with their switchblades, and improvised memorials by putting roses
in empty liquor bottles with cigarettes, joints, used needles, and love
notes.Some even carved the wall with
slogans:

TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE

DON’T LET THEM TAKE YOU ALIVE

LOVE KILLS

Bard replaced the door
several times, then tore out the walls and divided up the rooms in the
apartment between the two adjacent rooms.So from then on, when he told the rockers there was no room 100, he was
telling the truth.But the young punk
rockers still flocked to the hotel.

To stay in the Chelsea Hotel required nerves of steel and
endurance; it wasn’t for the timid, the sensitive, or those needing rest and
quiet.

And the hotel today?It was overtaken by the relentless gentrification of the Chelsea neighborhood,
which doomed its status as a sanctuary for artists and weirdos.In 2007 Stanley Bard was forced out by the
heirs of the other co-owners, who then sold it, and in 2011 it was closed for
renovations.When Bard died in Florida
in February 2017, he rated a lengthy obit in the Times.

Long-time residents remain in the hotel to this day,
harassed by construction noises.The
present owners plan to reopen it in 2018, but, renovated and scrubbed up, it
will not be the Chelsea of legend.I
walked by it recently and found the façade masked by lofty blue scaffolding
above, and the ground floor fronted by tunnel-like scaffolding with a plaque
beside the entrance announcing the building’s listing with the National Register
of Historic Places.Flanking it in the
tunnel is Doughnut Plant on one side and Chelsea Guitars on the other.

Source note:For much of the information in this post I am indebted to Ed Hamilton’s Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with
Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007).For more about the Chelsea, you can’t do
better than read this memoir.

******

BROWDERBOOKS: No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, my selection of posts from this blog, has received these awards: the Tenth Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Regional Non-Fiction; first place in the Travel category of the 2015-2016 Reader Views Literary Awards; and Honorable Mention in the Culture category of the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for 2016. For the Reader Views review by Sheri Hoyte, go here. As always, the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The Pleasuring of Men (Gival Press, 2011), the first novel in the Metropolis series, tells the story of a young male prostitute in the late 1860s in New York who falls in love with his most difficult client It is likewise available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Coming soon: Strange occupations in New York City. Who cares for the fine chinaware and filigreed brass room numbers from the Waldorf Astoria's legendary past? Who made Jackie Kennedy Onassis's wigs? Who brings the ships in safely through the shallow, sandbar-ridden Outer Harbor? Who calls himself the keeper of 40,000 souls and says good-bye to them every night when he leaves for home? More where-but-in-New-York stories.

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